Weapons of Choice Read online

  Oh, the Japs were gonna win this war for sure.

  He knew that really big bang, the one that lit up that giant carrier away on the horizon—the Akagi they reckoned—he knew that was a lucky strike, or maybe just a dive-bomber tumbling into the deck.

  Just about every single plane they’d managed to put up had quickly disappeared in a dirty ball of orange flame and oily smoke. He could tell that the enormous volumes of fire they were putting out were trailing off as their sister ships disappeared, one after the other, inside dazzling white-hot dwarf stars. He’d seen the Phelps go up just a few yards away like a giant magnesium flare.

  He didn’t know how they could defend themselves.

  But he did know that Admiral Spruance had to be told what he was up against.

  If he could just tell the admiral, he’d know what to do.

  When he saw the New Orleans go up, Dan Black knew they were all going to die. He watched that long, wingless plane—that thing that looked like a flying hammerhead shark—as it flashed over the flight deck of the Enterprise. His thigh muscles bunched and he distinctly felt his ass pucker as he waited for the firestorm to spit out of its belly. He’d seen that happen twice now to other ships. But the Enterprise was spared. Christ only knew why. And the rocket—if Curtis was right—passed over them with such speed you could practically see the wall of compressed air that attended its passage. It knocked men off their feet down on the flight deck, swept a few of them over the side, and even seemed to flatten the waves beneath it.

  In Lieutenant Commander Black’s opinion, something traveling that fast—if it was built solid, it’d punch right through a battleship.

  And sure enough, he’d have sworn the New Orleans actually rocked on her axis when the thing struck her. All ten thousand tons of her. Just before that globe of silent white light ballooned outward from the impact point and swallowed up the whole ship.

  That was when he knew they were all going to die.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2307 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Kolhammer ran his eyes over the screens in front of him and the firestorm lighting the darkness outside. They were in battle. He had no idea with whom and over what. But men and women were dying by the thousands if the flatscreen reports and the evidence of the night outside were to be believed. The deck of the Clinton was aflame, reminding him of the oil fires he’d witnessed in all of the Gulf Wars.

  “Any word on Captain Chandler?” Kolhammer asked Commander Judge, knowing the answer before the ship’s executive officer spoke.

  Judge checked both his flexipad and a workstation, with his mouth fixed in a grim line. He confirmed what the admiral had feared.

  “He’s gone, sir, along with everybody on the flight deck and another six hundred here and there. It’s your ship, Admiral.”

  None of the men or women on the bridge turned from their stations, but Kolhammer felt the weight of their expectations fall on him. Their lives were now in his hands.

  “Lieutenant Brooks.” He addressed the CIC boss, who was looking much less bilious, thanks to the Promatil flush. “Give it to me quick and dirty. Force status and enemy disposition. Mike, give me ship status when the lieutenant’s finished.”

  Judge began to gather damage reports from the carrier’s various departments while Kolhammer watched Brooks’s hands flying over her touch screen. The young woman’s face was impassive, although Kolhammer guessed her mind and heart would be racing.

  “We’re still out of contact with our subs, Admiral. Sensors can’t find Chicago or Denver anywhere. Garrett, Vanguard, Dessaix, Sutanto, Nuku, and Nagoya are also still missing. There’s no available datum point indicating those ships have been sunk. They’re just missing. The Leyte Gulf isn’t responding. Drone surveillance indicates counterboarding operations are under way. Fearless has been destroyed.”

  Brooks allowed herself a quick, rueful expression at that before continuing.

  “The Kandahar has taken some fire and reports a torpedo strike. The damage is serious but contained. Eighty-six confirmed KIA. Moreton Bay reports multiple hits. The Siranui has suffered a major impact on her bridge. Captain Okada is dead, along with his exec and five other officers. Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki has assumed control and authorized the CI to respond at Level One. The Havoc is undetected and has launched one Type Ninety-two heavy torpedo, killing the boat that torpedoed us.”

  Kolhammer nodded. He’d been certain the Havoc had sunk that ship. At least he’d gotten that right, he thought dolefully, as Brooks spoke again.

  “Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we’re running through our defensive stocks at an unsustainable rate. There’s just too much incoming. We’re taking it out, but if it keeps up at this pace we’ll have exhausted Metal Storm within another seven minutes. The laser pods will be okay for another ten, but they’ll need to power down pretty shortly after that. All other force elements are reporting the same. The Moreton Bay has already run through her stock of MS munitions. Trident has taken up a position shepherding her, but they’re getting hungry, too.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll take it under consideration,” he said. “What can you tell me about who we’re fighting?”

  Brooks’s air of detachment faltered at that.

  “I can’t with any certainty, sir. They’re not returning any signatures from our combatant database. Their signals and electronic profiles don’t match anything Chinese or Indian or even Islamic Republic. Weapons suites are . . . well, Stone Age. That was a dumb iron bomb we got hit with topside before.”

  “Delivery system?”

  “I’m streaming video from the topside cams and drones. It’s a museum piece.”

  Three windows opened up on screen. Each carried low-light-amplified footage from various angles showing an old propeller-driven monoplane nosing down a few thousand feet over the Clinton’s flight deck. The acid level in Kolhammer’s stomach rose painfully, leaving a sour taste at the back of his throat. He understood Brooks’s reluctance to make a call on the attacker’s ID. But he recognized it immediately.

  As a twelve-year-old boy he’d built a plastic model of a Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber. It had taken young Phillip Kolhammer three months to save the money needed to buy that kit. It took him weeks of work, getting every detail right, the flush-riveted stretched-skin wing covering; the Wright R-1820-52 nine-cylinder radial air-cooled engine; the painting inside the cutaway aluminum alloy fuel tanks. Two center-section seventy-five-gallon tanks, as he recalled, and another two fifty-five-gallon outer wing tanks. He’d done such a good job on it, taken such serious, professional care, that his father, a career coastguardsman, bought him another model kit as a reward.

  He sat, staring at the screen as the vision looped back on itself. A Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber.

  “Admiral?” Commander Judge laid a hand on his shoulder, just lightly. “Admiral. Captain Halabi’s on laser link. I think you’d better take the call. They’ve been running analysis a few minutes longer than us.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” he croaked, dragging his eyes away from the replay. Outside, the battle continued. As he turned to Karen Halabi’s attractive face, which occupied almost all of a single monitor on his left, three violent blooms of light and fire marked the destruction of a volley of incoming shells just a few hundred meters from the carrier’s bow. A shower of hot shrapnel pattered onto the flight deck, but it didn’t matter. All human life had ended out there a few minutes earlier.

  “Captain. Please report.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.” The British officer looked unhappy. “They’re Americans, Admiral. We’ve been killing American sailors. And they’ve been trying to kill us.”

  “How?” he asked, finding himself increasingly exasperated, but not disbelieving her. The plane in the looped video. He couldn’t shake the image.

  “I don’t know how. I really have no idea. But we’ve had six minutes more than you to get over the neural effect—” Kolhammer noted that she didn’t call it an attack. “—We s
hared data with the Havoc, and we can’t get past the fact. They’re American. Old Americans.”

  “What do you mean, Captain?”

  Captain Halabi wasn’t known for her delicacy. She didn’t soften the blow now.

  “We’ve positively identified eight major combatants, cross-matched drone footage with archival data, and cataloged enough signals intelligence to confirm the theory. We’re firing on Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen, out of Pearl Harbor, bound for Midway Atoll, originally under the command of Admiral Frank Fletcher, now led by Admiral Ray Spruance. Fletcher was on the USS Yorktown. It’s been destroyed.”

  Halabi was neither belligerent nor challenging. She could have been war-gaming at Staff College for all the emotion she invested in her delivery. Kolhammer couldn’t help but sneak a quick peek at the cam coverage of the dive-bomber again.

  “Any proof?” he said.

  It was as if she had been waiting for the question. The screen carrying her face split into four windows. She occupied the top right corner. The other three cycled through a selection of images, real-time video of World War II–vintage cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, churning up a maelstrom of foam at their sterns as they maneuvered frantically—and all too frequently in vain—while attempting to outrun a supercavitating torpedo or combat mace. Kolhammer’s nausea returned as he watched a destroyer die inside a small cyclone of ballistic munitions. The image rewound and the ship reintegrated itself as torrents of white fire were sucked back into the decks and superstructure. The vision froze, and the other two windows cycled through a series of still photographs of the same vessel.

  The pictures, culled from files across Fleetnet, had been taken on a number of different occasions, more than eighty years earlier.

  As Kolhammer sat quietly, Halabi repeated the performance with four other ships. Three destroyers and one cruiser. There was no doubt. They were sinking these very ships. But how? No, that question would have to wait.

  “We have extensive intercepts,” said Halabi. “Ship-to-ship. Aircraft in-flight. Internal communications.”

  “Okay,” said Kolhammer. “Make it quick.”

  A sound channel opened and an avalanche of American voices spilled out. They sounded subtly different from the voices he was used to hearing around him, but regardless he listened as men begged for information, for ammunition. For God’s help. The raw fear, the crash of gunfire, and the animalistic sounds of human beings contending in blood were all intimately familiar to Phillip Kolhammer. The traffic was genuine. He could feel it in his gut. Then, for the first time since the world had gone insane, he had a single, quiet thought.

  The Nagoya.

  “Shit,” he spat quietly.

  “Sir?” said Mike Judge.

  “Later. Commander, get this out now, fleetwide. All offensive systems are to go offline immediately.”

  “Offline. Acknowledged.”

  “CIs to retain autonomy for point defense only. All units to maneuver for defensive fire support. Have the CIs work it out, and we’ll coordinate through Little Bill. We’ll need to put the Siranui at our center.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Captain Halabi, I’ll have to get back to you. Please stand by. Lieutenant Brooks, get me the comm boss.”

  The freckled face of Lieutenant Stuart Glover filled the window where Karen Halabi had just been resident.

  “Lieutenant, open up a line with one of the ships we’ve encountered. I need to talk to Admiral Ray Spruance on the USS Enterprise.”

  Before the young man could protest, Kolhammer held up the palm of his hand.

  “I know. I know. Lieutenant Brooks will brief you. But later. I need this done yesterday. Just make it happen.”

  “Aye, sir,” he answered unsurely.

  Mike Judge was staring at him as though he’d lost his mind. Kolhammer reopened his channel to Halabi, and thanked her grimly. She signed off to attend to her own problems.

  “Damage reports,” said Kolhammer. “The lite version.”

  “Seven hundred and thirty dead, three hundred wounded, about half of them critically. We’ve lost all the catapults, with heavy damage to the aircraft tied down outboard of number one. Eighteen Raptors totally trashed, and another two can only be salvaged for parts. Four torpedo strikes, but only one detonated. The inner hull retained its integrity but there’s a big fucking mess needs cleaning up

  7

  USS LEYTE GULF, 2312 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Halon gas and ammonium dihydrogen phosphate dust had smothered the flames in the chopper bay and asphyxiated any lingering survivors of Lieutenant Reilly’s temporary command. Specialist Nix scanned the room twice, but failed to get even a phantom return from a single biochip. Everybody was dead. He estimated the gaping maw in the portside bulkhead at maybe ten feet across. The hole gave him a window on the battle outside. As Nix waved his flexipad back and forth one last time, scanning for life signs, a small supernova dawned on the horizon. His combat goggles adjusted to filter out the blinding, incandescent light of a subnuclear warhead. Fanged shadows stretched out across the charnel house floor of the hangar.

  Nix spun out of the hatchway, dragging the waterproof door closed behind him. It wouldn’t seal properly. The ship had been wrenched too far out of shape. He abandoned the effort and hurried up the corridor. Sessions was only slowly coming to, still lying propped up where Nix had left him. He ran a quick check on his partner, zapped a message out to send a medic, and hurried on again.

  A stairwell outside the mail center led all the way down to D deck, but Nix descended only as far as B before heading forward. He thought the decks were angled down a fraction. All that extra weight up front, and they were probably breached beneath the waterline, too. Though shipnet was supposed to track his position, he didn’t trust it to be working properly and forewarn the other fire teams, so he yelled out every ten steps or so.

  “Nix. Counterboarding. Coming through for Captain Anderson.”

  He nearly tripped over a dead sailor outside the main mess. Half her face was missing. A little farther on, her attacker—he assumed it was her attacker—had been chewed over by at least half a strip of caseless 33mm.

  When ceramic ammunition entered an unprotected human body, it unfurled itself inside, expanding from a small, fantastically dense lozenge into something resembling a miniature thornbush composed of hundreds of semi-rigid razor tendrils. Ceramic rounds would chew right through Kevlar. Multiple impacts would even significantly degrade monobonded carbon. The effect on human beings, who were engineered nowhere near as well, was dramatic and deeply unpleasant. Above the waistline, most of the attacker had disintegrated into a fine pulp that now painted the corridor.

  Nix had seen it before. He checked his pace so as not to slip in the liquid waste, but gave it no heed beyond that. He soon came upon Ntini and McAllister, crouched down behind an upturned desk.

  “Specialist Nix, coming through!” he yelled.

  They risked a quick glance back, then waved him up.

  His body armor afforded more protection than their barricade, but he crouched down to their level anyway. Twenty meters farther on a wall of wet, gray steel blocked the corridor. Three of his shipmates were sprawled promiscuously over each other just in front of it. Their blood had pooled beneath them, prevented from running down toward McAllister and Ntini by the slight dip of the ship’s bow.

  A man-sized opening had been blown through the iron curtain.

  “How’d they do that?” asked Nix.

  McAllister answered in a hoarse whisper.

  “A shaped charge.”

  “Nice work. The captain in there?”

  “You should be able to pick up her locator chip once you’re inside. Head right for two minutes. It’s a fucking mess like you wouldn’t believe in there, but they’re trailing tape. You should pick them up. Point-to-point’s scratchy once you get in, so let them know you’re coming up. They’ve been hit from behind twice already. Chris Gregory got wasted like
that. Clancy blew him away when he popped up without warning.”

  “Got it.”

  Nix patted the shoulder of McAllister’s old Kevlar vest and leapt the overturned table in one bound.

  That’s five now, she thought.

  She’d lost five of her crew since stepping into this twisted nightmare, one of them to friendly fire.

  “You okay?” she asked Clancy.

  “Fine for now,” he replied. “Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t mine, either.”

  “That’s right.”

  Captain Daytona Anderson knew the tremors and the nausea would come later for Clancy. Along with the guilt.

  Couldn’t be helped.

  She repeated that mantra to herself, like a Zen koan meant to exhaust the intellect and prepare the mind for an intuitive response.

  Because Christ knows, there’s nothing for the rational mind to hold on to in here.

  She was wedged into a crawl space created by the intersection of the Gulf’s rail gun control room with what looked like an old galley of some sort. Her features creased as she contemplated the sight of two members of her own crew and five strangers who had . . . What, materialized? . . . inside each other, and within a Gordian knot of metal, plastic, and wooden fixtures.

  The shooting, which had slackened off for a few minutes, picked up again. A few rounds ricocheted by her head, off a butcher block that had been fused with a flatscreen workstation, showering Anderson with splinters of wood and plastic. Clancy fired without hesitation. She had no idea what he was shooting at, but somebody screamed. Whoever it was almost cried out loud enough to cover the sick, ripping thud that was the signature note of a ceramic bullet striking unprotected flesh. Then another voice called out, but it was controlled and steady.

  “Specialist Nix, coming through, Captain!”

  Anderson checked her flexipad. It was working again. The screen displayed icons for the locator chips implanted in the necks of her crew within a twenty-meter radius.